Corruption has consistently been misdiagnosed in Nigeria and much of the developing world, over the years as mainly a behavioral problem. As a result so much focus has been brought to bear on anti-corruption agenices and other law enforcement organisations with the hope of extracting good behavior from the people. What we are seeing however and not understanding, is that you cannot whip people into an unclear or missing line. If we were to bring the right focus to the right actions, we could significantly check corruption within the next 2 years and what an achievement that would be!
Corruption has consistently been misdiagnosed in Nigeria and much of the developing world, over the years as mainly a behavioral problem. As a result so much focus has been brought to bear on anti-corruption agenices and other law enforcement organisations with the hope of extracting good behavior from the people. What we are seeing however and not understanding, is that you cannot whip people into an unclear or missing line. If we were to bring the right focus to the right actions, we could significantly check corruption within the next 2 years and what an achievement that would be!
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Corruption is defined as the perversion of official activities for inappropriate personal gain. It is caused and sustained by poor service delivery and in a previous ThisDay article “The Corruption Riddle”; I illustrated this practice using the 2011 Voters Registration process. In summary, I observed that the process started failing and was being corrupted, when resources and time became too scarce for the increased demand. Had the process continued long enough without an appropriate response from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), it would have fallen foul of the same deep corruption problems that bedevil our Public Services.
THE PUBLIC SECTOR IS CORRUPTION ENGINE
Any Nigerian who thinks through numerous corruption encounters will find that they either originate from or are sustained by public service officials. First-time visitors make contact with national corruption mainly through the Public Sector Organisations (PSO) either at the embassies where they go to process visas or at the airports or other national borders. Most high-profile political corruption will usually not succeed without the active connivance of public sector employees who collect their share of the loot and keep quiet. In an August 2011 interview with The Moment, former Military Governor of Anambra State, Wing Commander Emmanuel Ukaegbu (Rtd), said that civil servants usually instigate and provide the means by which the governors execute their brazen looting1. While speaking at a training event for executive officers of ministries, departments and agencies, Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi is reported in The Nation of February 24, 2012, to have said that “for every fraud committed by a political office holder, no fewer than five civil servants participated in it”2. So, the Nigerian public sector is the corruption engine. Retool it and we fix corruption.
Also, when people say that corruption causes poor service delivery what they see is actually the latter end of the corrupting process where corrupt employees, emboldened by earlier successes, take steps to further undermine the system in order to consolidate and sustain their private illegal gains. Corruption is not the cause of poor service delivery instead poor service delivery enables the conditions that create and sustain corruption.
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Hence, any anti-corruption program that does not focus on making the public sector more effective is largely a waste of effort because people will still go the route that best serves their interests. When corruption is addressed mainly as a service delivery problem, significant improvements can be smoothly implemented at the foundation of the system, far away from the high-tension politically-loaded end where the likes of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) are currently battling, with mixed results. By focusing on fixing failed and failing services and processes we plug the leaks and ensure no more crimes are committed through that route. We thereby prevent proactively rather than wait to catch defaulters and hope that punishment will be sufficient deterrent to others. Once robust processes are in place, relevant enforcement agencies can more easily and more effectively police the polity.
FIX PUBLIC SECTOR REWARD SYSTEM
So, how do we go about fixing the public sector in order to ensure effective services that will make corrupt options unattractive? We can gain an insight into this question by looking the incentive structures of the PSOs relative to their private sector counterparts and we find the following three pertinent points. Unlike the private sector,
1. Income is not an incentive to produce good work as it is guaranteed irrespective of work done.
2. There is no incentive to please customers and no customer satisfaction measurements because there is no competition and more customers do not translate to more income.
3. There is little or no accountability to stakeholders or investors.
What is needed therefore are mechanisms that will connect the earnings of the PSO employee to quality service delivery, induce high customer satisfaction and hold PSO executives in particular, accountable for the performance of the organisations under their purview.
To address these issues to a large extent, I recommend a "Penalty for Delay" (PFD) policy. This is a fine payable to any unsatisfied customer who makes a successful claim of poor service delivery against a PSO. I believe that such a fine, if implemented in a manner that impacts the pockets or budgets of the PSOs and their employees on a monthly basis - being a real enough time to compete with the timeline within which corrupt employees currently receive the proceedings of their activities - will make a significant difference in public service delivery. Without such a strong mechanism there will be less incentive for these organisations to change in any meaningful manner.
In The Netherlands for example, there is a policy to refund customers for delayed trains. Customers are offered a free ride and / or refunded some or all of their fare depending on how late the train is. Suffice it to say that the trains in the Netherlands are exceptionally on time.
To support high customer satisfaction a simple feedback mechanism needs to be implemented to capture customer views on services and recommendations for improvement. I believe if PFD is in place, PSO employees will proactively work this feedback processes to ensure they are in the forefront of preventing any financial losses and they will through that process, ensure high customer satisfaction.
HOLD PSO EXECUTIVES ACCOUNTABLE
In order to hold public sector executives accountable for the performance of their organisations, these executives need to render stewardship accounts on a quarterly basis to report on their performance against promises, report on budget spent and income received, where applicable with proof of any claims. This could then become a basis for assessing the performance of that executive towards a decision to either retain them in those positions or not, while aligning their interest to that of their employees and customers.
As a result we can probably see less jostling for these positions when political jobbers realise that running public service organisations is serious business. There could also be a reduction in nepotism as these executives better manage the conflict between competence and relationships.
The Service Commission (SERVICOM) is well-positioned to implement the PFD and feedback policies as it is already doing similar things although in a more laid-back manner. And they can be empowered by an enabling law from the National Assembly. We owe ourselves a duty to demand such a warranty of service from PSOs in exchange for the monies that are constantly allocated to them on annual basis.
On its part, the National Assembly needs to use their oversight committees to audit the performance of these PSOs on a quarterly basis. If PFD is in place, they can get significant value from just measuring the percentage of claims paid by the PSOs and the relative number of claims compared to the total number of services provided in other to gauge the effectiveness of the organisation.
There is no doubt that a lot of pre-work will be needed to make these initiatives work because Service Charters need to be defined by the PSOs to capture the services they offer and the service levels within which they offer them. However, this is also a good thing because it can provide an objective basis to evaluate their capability in terms of manpower, budget, etc in order to match their demands to the quality and quantity of services they want to provide. Such rigor can only further strengthen these organisations and reduce bureaucracy.
The impact of these policies on even the psyche of the average Nigerian and even on the career government official will be tremendous enough to catalyse the improvements we all desire. Imagine walking into a Nigerian police station and having the neatly-dressed front desk officer attend to you respectfully and courteously, type in your complaint and print a receipt out to you. No police support fee requested, no need to know an influential member of society and no fear that you will lose your case because the opposite person has more money or knows more powerful people!
We can and must make our change happen. Citizens must demand a service revolution by pushing for the implementation of these mechanisms both by the executive and the legislature. The National Assembly needs to consider and pass laws that will enable the future these mechanisms can help us attain. If given the required focus, these things can happen in time to be implemented as part of 2013 budget cycle.
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